Louis_Wu's Journal: Bookmarks across 3 computers and 4 operating systems.

Grrrrr.

My computer at work is missing most of the file changes I've made since the begining of the month. The server my files are stored on died (actually had a boo-boo during "upgrade" to Win2k), and last week's backup apparently wasn't good (why wasn't that checked before the upgrade?) - so I don't have any file changes since Aug 31. That's nine ( 9!!! ) days of lost computer time! I'm ticked off.

The only silver lining is that in the last month I've been doing mostly offline work. Boeing may be a "high-tech 21st Century Company" in the advertisements, but the 767 is still largely maintained on traditional (20 year old) drawings. Two dimensional drawings. Produced and changed by hand. With a pen in your hand, and a straight edge on the drafting board. ... But that means that a lot of my work lately has been on paper. Quick comparisons, one-offs, literally combining parts by tracing them onto the same paper. So most of my work is still sitting on my desk. (So don't burn down the Everett facility, then I'd be really mad.) But all of my summaries were electronic. The listings of part numbers, the collection of data, heh, even the collation of data. And now I have to take my last paper copies of all of that data and see if they match what has now been restored to my computer. Aarrgghh.

The point of this journal.

The real kicker is that I now have motivation (lost time & effort is a good motivator) to find/create a way to bookmark websites from my work computer which won't disappear. I've been thinking of this for a while, since I surf the net from work, from my home computer in Linux & from Windows - that's 2 computers with 3 operating systems. This week my PowerBook should arrive, so I'll be adding a computer/OS. And I want to see ALL of my bookmarks from any computer. I want to connect to my website from work and find the site I bookmarked last night. I want to surf from work, and bookmark someplace, and be able to access that bookmark from home. Or from my friends computer at his house. I need an automated system which stores, sorts, categorizes, and presents my bookmarks. Well, I can do the sorting and categorization, but I need a cross-platform, web accessible method to store bookmarks. I'll deal with email after I'm done with this. :)

The answer's Perl ;)

[Cally]

It just happens that I'm working on a Perl module for munging bookmarks, originally started to tackle exactly this problem. So far it only parses mozilla's file format but the idea is to add plugins for other browsers/formats. Work in progress (rough, no docs) is at http://www.zpok.demon.co.uk (scroll down.)